Ecological effects of aviation

This chapter describes how the technological equilibrium that existed in the middle of the 19th century was punctuated by a series of momentous discoveries and inventions including oil as a lubricant and fuel, the internal combustion engine, Bell’s telephone and Edison’s electric light bulb. Kerosene and the internal combustion engine were vital contributors to the first powered flight that took place at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Orville and Wilbur Wright’s outstanding achievement was quickly followed by a spectacular sequence of inventions in aeronautical engineering, which led to the Concorde and commercial supersonic aviation within 70 years of their inaugural flight. Over this time air transport has become faster, safer, more fuel efficient, less polluting and less noisy. An improving understanding of aerodynamics led to rocketry and ultimately to space exploration and therefore “transport beyond the earth”. Satellite imagery of the Earth is now commonplace and is widely used by science to monitor the global landscape, its biodiversity and a wide range of environmental variables including, in particular, the effects of climate change. This chapter attempts to describe the positive and negative affects of aviation. These impacts occur on different scales that range from the global (aviation’s contribution of global warming gases to the atmosphere) to the local (airfield habitat and wildlife control measures).